After a couple weeks of daily-driving Sailfish OS on the new Jolla Phone 2 (2026), here's my take on the European, privacy-first alternative to the Android and iOS duopoly. Design, hardware, camera...
Also, no mainline kernel support. Pretty sure it’d be easy to do for Jolla (even I manage to do some mainlining work and I don’t sell phones).
This means it’ll be a security nightmare at some point, just like any other phone.
Plus the specific app format. You cannot install the many nice GNOME apps, KDE apps and others that already exist.
I do have a SailfishOS phone for testing, but to make it even a bit useful I’d have to use AppSupport, which is Android in a container with a proprietary wrapper. There are barely any apps, they should leverage the power of the many mobile Linux apps that exist. I’d rather have some apps with a UI that looks different to the rest than not having what I need.
The app format lock in sounds crazy to me. How does it stop you from running other apps? Does it not have a terminal? Does it not give you sudo? Does it refuse to run any executables, or is it about the ui toolkit?
They just have their own format using their owm SailfishOS-specific UI libraries. Their apps don’t work elsewhere without patching, there’s no Flatpak and they only have SailfishOS apps in the repo.
Sure, you can write your own apps, but I prefer using what’s already there.
It being proprietary is a nonstarter for me
It’s just the user interface.
Use Nemo if you prefer that.
Also, no mainline kernel support. Pretty sure it’d be easy to do for Jolla (even I manage to do some mainlining work and I don’t sell phones).
This means it’ll be a security nightmare at some point, just like any other phone.
Plus the specific app format. You cannot install the many nice GNOME apps, KDE apps and others that already exist.
I do have a SailfishOS phone for testing, but to make it even a bit useful I’d have to use AppSupport, which is Android in a container with a proprietary wrapper. There are barely any apps, they should leverage the power of the many mobile Linux apps that exist. I’d rather have some apps with a UI that looks different to the rest than not having what I need.
This is what really makes it a non-starter for me. Also, if there was a mainline kernel, I could just install any other distro I want instead.
I’m still waiting for a somewhat modern phone with a fully functional mainline kernel.
The app format lock in sounds crazy to me. How does it stop you from running other apps? Does it not have a terminal? Does it not give you sudo? Does it refuse to run any executables, or is it about the ui toolkit?
Sorry for the barrage, that sounded outrageous
They just have their own format using their owm SailfishOS-specific UI libraries. Their apps don’t work elsewhere without patching, there’s no Flatpak and they only have SailfishOS apps in the repo.
Sure, you can write your own apps, but I prefer using what’s already there.